Baan IV – Now works over a DirectAccess connection

When companies deploy Microsoft DirectAccess, it is quite common to discover one or more applications that will not connect successfully over those DirectAccess tunnels. Typically this happens with older legacy applications, but many current and up-to-date apps can suffer from this behavior as well. The core problem with these applications is an IPv6 incompatibility. All DirectAccess traffic flowing between the DA clients and the DA server is IPv6. Nothing inside the corporate network needs to be IPv6 capable or compatible, because the DA server spins the packets down into IPv4 on the way into the network. But ultimately, all traffic that is leaving the laptop, headed for the DA server, those must all be IPv6 packets and so the client-side applications and software must be able to generate IPv6 packets in order for those apps to successfully connect.

Fortunately, a number of years ago we developed a utility that fixes this behavior for the applications that cannot generate IPv6 packets. App46 installs onto your DA client computers, intercepts packets from those problematic non-IPv6 applications, and translates those IPv4 packets into IPv6, thereby allowing them to move over the DA tunnels without issue.

One of the applications I recently encountered that wasn’t working over DirectAccess is called Baan IV. This is an older ERP system that runs on Solaris 9. Even though the software is aging, it is still used by many companies in the wild.

There are newer versions of Baan as well, but at this point we do not have any data as to whether or not the newer versions will work natively over DirectAccess.

We can confirm, however, that Baan IV works perfectly well over DirectAccess with the installation of the App46 tool to translate the packets. So even if the newer versions of Baan don’t account for IPv6 natively, we can still utilize the App46 tool in order to get those packets flowing over a DirectAccess tunnel.

For more information on the IVO Networks App46 tool, check out this link.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly!